THE
SHARING KNIFE
Volume Two
LEGACY
Contents
Maps Chapter 1
Dag had been married for a whole two hours, and…
Chapter 2
The bridge the young man guarded was crudely cut timber…
Chapter 3
Fawn turned in her saddle to look as they passed…
Chapter 4
Beyond the clearing with the two tent-cabins, the gray of…
Chapter 5
Bag left on a mumbled errand soon after it was light…
Chapter 6
Dag returned from the medicine tent reluctant to speak of…
Chapter 7
They turned left onto the shady road between the shore…
Chapter 8
They were making ready to lie down in their bedroll…
Chapter 9
It was midnight before Dag returned to Tent Bluefield. Fawn…
Chapter 10
Three days gone, Fawn thought. Today would begin the fourth…
Chapter 11
Another night attack—without the aid of groundsense this time.
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Dag woke well after dark, to roll his aching body…
Chapter 14
By sunset, Fawn guessed she had covered about twenty-five miles…
Chapter 15
He had floated in an increasingly timeless gray fog, all…
Chapter 16
For the next couple of days Dag seemed willing to…
Chapter 17
Some six days after striking the north road, the little…
Chapter 18
Fawn woke late the next morning, she judged by the…
Chapter 19
Fawn let out her breath as Dag settled again beside…
About the Author
Other Books by Lois McMaster Bujold Copyright
1
D
ag had been married for a whole two hours, and was still light-headed with wonder. The weighted ends of the wedding cord coiling around his upper arm danced in time with the lazy trot of his horse. Riding by his side, Fawn—my new bride, now there was a phrase to set a man’s mind melting— met his smile with happy eyes.My farmer bride. It should have been impossible. There would be trouble about that, later.
Trouble yesterday, trouble tomorrow. But no trouble now. Now, in the light of the loveliest summer afternoon he ever did see, was only a boundless contentment.
Once the first half dozen miles were behind them, Dag found both his and Fawn’s urgency to be gone from the wedding party easing. They passed through the last village on the northern river road, after which the wagon way became more of a two-rut track, and the remaining farms grew farther apart, with more woods between them. He let a few more miles pass, till he was sure they were out of range of any potential retribution or practical jokers, then began keeping an eye out for a spot to make camp. If a Lakewalker patroller with this much woods to choose from couldn’t hide from farmers, something was wrong. Secluded, he decided, was a better watchword still.
an observant eye at him as he lay with his back against a broad beech bole and plucked irritably at the sling supporting his right arm with the hook replacing his left hand.
“You have a job,” she told him encouragingly. “You’re on guard against the mosquitoes, ticks, chiggers, and blackflies.”
“And squirrels,” he added hopefully.
“We’ll get to them.”
Food did not have to be caught or skinned or cooked, just unwrapped and eaten till they couldn’t hold any more, although Fawn tried his limits. Dag wondered if this new mania for feeding him was a Bluefield custom no one had mentioned, or just a lingering effect of the excitement of the day, as she tried to find her way into her farmwifely tasks without, actually, a farm in which to set them. But when he compared this to many a cold, wet, hungry, lonely, exhausted night on some of the more dire patrols in his memory, he thought perhaps he’d wandered by strange accident into some paradise out of a song, and bears would come out tonight to dance around their fire in celebration.
He looked up to find Fawn inching nearer, without, for a change, provender in her hands. “It’s not dark yet,” she sighed.
He cast her a slow blink, to tease. “And dark is needed for what?”
“Bedtime!”
“Well, I admit it’s a help for sleeping. Are you that sleepy? It’s been a tiring day. We could just roll over and…”
She caught on, and poked him in reproof. “Ha! Are you sleepy?”
“How odd that this all should feel harder, now.”
He kissed her hair beneath his chin. “There’s a weight of expectation that wasn’t there before, I suppose. I didn’t…” He hesitated.
“Hm?”
“I rode into West Blue, onto your family’s farm, last week thinking…I don’t know. That I would be a clever Lakewalker persuader and get my way. I expected to change their lives. I didn’t expect them to change my life right back. I didn’t used to be Fawn’s patroller, still less Fawn’s husband, but now I am. That’s a ground transformation, in case you didn’t realize. It doesn’t just happen in the cords. It happens in our deep selves.” He gave a nod toward his left sleeve hiding the loop binding his own arm. “Maybe the hard feeling is just shyness for the two new people we’ve become.”
“Hm.” She settled down, briefly reassured. But then sat up again, biting her lip the way she did when about to tackle some difficult subject, usually head-on. “Dag. About my ground.”
“I love your ground.”
Her lips twitched in a smile, but then returned to seriousness. “It’s been over four weeks since…since the malice. I’m healing up pretty good inside, I think.”
“I think so, too.”
“Do you suppose we could…I mean, tonight because…we haven’t ever yet…not that I’m complaining, mind you. Erm. That pattern in their ground you said women get when they can have babies. Do I have it tonight?”
“Not yet. I don’t think it’ll be much longer till your body’s back to its usual phases, though.”
“So we could. I mean. Do it in the usual way. Tonight.”
She snickered. “I do wonder how you learned all those tricks.”
“Well, not all at once, absent gods forfend. You pick up this and that over the years. I suspect people everywhere keep reinventing all the basics. There’s only so much you can do with a body. Successfully and comfortably, that is. Leaving aside stunts.”
“Stunts?” she said curiously.
“We’re leaving them aside,” he said definitely. “One broken arm is enough.”
“One too many, I think.” Her brows drew down in new worry. “Um. I was envisioning you up on your elbows, but really, I think maybe not. It doesn’t exactly sound comfortable, and I wouldn’t want you to hurt your arm and have to start healing all over, and besides, if you slipped, you really would squash me like a bug.”
It took him a moment to puzzle out her concern. “Ah, not a problem. We just switch sides, top to bottom. If you can ride a horse, which I note you do quite well, you can ride me. And you can squash me all you want.”
She thought this through. “I’m not sure I can do this right.”
“If you do something really wrong, I promise I’ll scream in pain and let you know.”
She grinned, if with a slight tinge of dismay.
riveting to his eye, too. She folded up his astonishing wedding shirt with fully the care he would have wished, tucking it away. He lay back on his bedroll and let her pull off his trousers and drawers with all her considerable determination. She folded them up too, and came and sat, no, plunked, again beside him. The after-wobble was delightful.
“Arm harness. On or off?”
“Hm. Off, I think. Don’t want to risk jabbing you in a distracted moment.” The disquieting memory of her bleeding fingers weaving her wedding cord flitted through his mind, and he became conscious again of it wound around his upper arm, and the tiny hum of its live ground. Her live ground.
With practiced hands, she whisked the hook harness away onto the top of the clothes pile, and he marveled anew at how easy it was all becoming with her.
Except for, blight it all again, having no working hand. The sling had gone west just before the shirt, and he shifted his right arm and attempted to wriggle his fingers. Ouch. No. Not enough useful motion there yet. Inside his splints and wrappings, his skin, damp from the sweat of the warm day, was itching. He couldn’t touch. All right, there was a certain amount he could do with his tongue—especially right now, as she returned and nuzzled up to him —but getting it to the right place at the right time was going to be an insurmountable challenge, in this position.
She withdrew her lips from his and began working her way down his body. It was lovely but almost redundant; it had been well over a week, after all, and…It used to be years, and I scarcely blinked. He tried to relax and let himself be made love to. Relaxation wasn’t exactly what was happening. His hips twitched as Fawn’s full attention arrived at his nether regions. She swung her leg over, turned to face him, reached down, and began to try to position herself. Stopped.
“Urk?” he inquired politely. Some such noise, anyway.
“Oil?” he croaked.
“I shouldn’t need oil for this, should I?”
Not if I had a hand to ready you nicely. “Hang should, do what works. You shouldn’t have that uncomfortable look on your face, either.”
“Hm.” She extracted herself, padded over to his saddlebags, and rummaged within. Good view from the back, too, as she bent over…A mutter of mild triumph, “Ah.” She padded back, pausing to frown and rub the sole of one bare foot on her other shin after stepping on a pebble. Was this a time to stop for pebbles…?
Back she came, sliding over him. Small hands slicked him, which made him jolt. He did not allow himself to plunge upward. Let her find her way in her own time. She attempted to do so.
She was getting a very determined look again. “Maidenheads don’t
regrow, do they…?”
“Shouldn’t think so.”
“I didn’t think it was supposed to hurt the second time.”
“Probably just unaccustomed muscles. Not in condition. Need more exercise.” It was driving him just short of mad to have no hands to grasp her hips and guide her home.
She blinked, taking in this thought. “Is that true, or more of your slick patroller persuasion?”
“Can’t it be both?”
She grinned, shifted her angle, then looked brighter, and said, “Ah! There we go.”
She muttered, “They get whole babies through these parts. Surely it’s supposed to stretch more.”
“Time. Give it.” Blight it, at this point in the usual proceedings, she would be the one who couldn’t form words anymore. They were out of rhythm tonight. He was losing his wits, and she was getting chatty. “Fine now.”
Her brows drew down in puzzlement. “Should this be like taking turns, or not?”
“Uhthink…” He swallowed to find speech. “Hope it’s good for you. Suspect it’s better for me. ’S exquisite for me right now.”
“Oh, that’s all right, then.” She sat for a moment, adjusting. It would likely not be a good idea at this point to screech and convulse and beg for motion; that would just alarm her. He didn’t want her alarmed. She might jump up and run off, which would be tragic. He wanted her relaxed and confident and…there, she was starting to smile again. She observed, “You have a funny look on your face.”
“I’ll bet.”
Her smile widened. Too gently and tentatively, she at last began to move.
Absent gods be praised. “After all,” she said, continuing a line of thought of which he had long lost track, “Mama had twins, and she isn’t that much taller than me. Though Aunt Nattie said she was pretty alarmin’ toward the end.”
“What?” said Dag, confused.
“Twins. Run in Mama’s side of the family. Which made it really unfair of her to blame Papa, Aunt Nattie said, but I guess she wasn’t too reasonable by then.”
Whatever this peculiar digression did to him—his spine felt like an overdrawn bow with its string about to snap—it seemed to relax Fawn. Her eyes darkening, she commenced to rock with more assurance. Her ground, blocked earlier by the discomfort and uncertainty, began to flow again.
Finally. But he wasn’t going to last much longer at this rate. He let his hips start to keep time with hers.
“If I only had a working hand to get down there, we would share this turn…” His fingers twitched in frustration.
“Another good reason to leave it be to heal faster,” she gasped. “Put that poor busted arm back on the blanket.”
“Ngh!” He wanted to touch her so much. Groundwork? A mosquito’s worth was not likely to be enough. Left-handed groundwork? He remembered the glass bowl, sliding and swirling back together. That had been no mere mosquito. Would she find it perverse, frightening, horrifying, to be touched so? Could he even…? This was her wedding night. She must not recall it with disappointment. He laid his left arm down across his belly, pointed at their juncture. Consider it a strengthening exercise for the ghost hand. Beats scraping hides all hollow, doesn’t it? Just…there.
“Oh!” Her eyes shot wide, and she leaned forward to stare into his face. “What did you just do?”
“Experiment,” he gritted out. Surely his eyes were as wide and wild as hers. “Think the broken right has been doing something to stir up my left ground. Like, not like?”
“Not sure. More…?”
“Oh, yeah…”
“Oh. Yeah. That’s…”
“Good?”
froze. Which was fine because now he did drive up, as that bowstring snapped at last, and everything unwound in white fire.
He didn’t think he’d passed out, but he seemed to come to with her draped across his chest wheezing and laughing wildly. “Dag! That was, that was… could you do that all along? Were you just saving it for a wedding present, or what?”
“I have no idea,” he confessed. “Never done anything like that before. I’m not even sure what I did do.”
“Well, it was quite…quite nice.” She sat up and pushed back her hair to deliver this in a judicious tone, but then dissolved into helpless laughter again.
“I’m dizzy. Feel like I’m about to fall down.”
“You are lying down.”
“Very fortunate.”
She tumbled down into the cradle of his left arm and snuggled in for a wordless time. Dag didn’t quite nap, but he wouldn’t have called it being awake, either. Bludgeoned, perhaps. Eventually, she roused herself enough to get them cleaned up and dressed in clothes to sleep in, because the blue twilight shadows were cooling as night slid in, seeping through the woods from the east. By the time she cuddled down again beside him, under the blanket this time, he was fully awake, staring up through the leaves at the first stars.
Her slim little fingers traced the furrows above his brows. “Are you all right? I’m all right.”
He managed a smile and kissed the fingers in passing. “I admit, I’ve unsettled myself a bit. You know how shaken I was after that episode with the glass bowl.”
“No, in fact. Although this wasn’t near such a draining effort. Pretty, um, stimulating, actually. Thing is…that night I mended the bowl, that was the first time I experienced that, that, call it a ghost hand. I tried several times after, secretly, to make it emerge again, but nothing happened. Couldn’t figure it out. In the parlor, you were upset, I was upset, I wanted to, I don’t know. Fix things. I wasn’t upset just now, but I sure was in, um, a heightened mood. Flying, your aunt Nattie called it. Except now I’ve fallen back down, and the ghost hand’s gone again.”
He glanced over to find her up on one elbow, looking at him with the same interested expression as ever. Happy eyes. Not shocked or scared or repelled. He said, “You don’t mind that it’s, well, strange? You think this is just the same as all the other things I do, don’t you?”
Her brows rose in consideration. “Well, you summon horses and bounce mosquitoes and make firefly lamps and kill malices and you know where everyone is for a country mile all around, and I don’t know what you did to Reed and Rush last night, but the effect was sure magical today. And what you do for me I can’t hardly begin to describe, not decently anyhow. How do you know it isn’t?”
He opened his mouth, then closed it, squinting at his question turned upside down.
She cocked her head, and continued, “You said Lakewalker folks’ groundsense doesn’t come in all at once, and not at all when they’re younger. Maybe this is just something you should have had all along, that got delayed. Or maybe it’s something you should have now, growing right on time.”
“So, that’s twice,” said Fawn, pursuing the thought. “So it can happen, um, more than once, anyhow. And it seems you don’t have to be unhappy for it to work. That’s real promising.”
“I’m not sure I can do it again.”
“That’d be a shame,” she said in a meditative tone. But her eyes were merry. “So, try it again next time and we’ll see, eh? And if not, as it seems you have no end of ingenuity in a bedroll, we’ll just do something else, and that’ll be good, too.” She gave a short, decisive nod.
“Well,” he said in a bemused voice. “That’s settled.”
She flopped down again, nestling in close, hugging him tight. “You’d best believe it.”
To Fawn’s gladness they lingered late in the glade the next morning, attempting to repeat some of last night’s trials; some were successful, some not. Dag couldn’t seem to induce his ghost hand again—maybe he was too relaxed?—which appeared to leave him someplace between disappointment and relief. As Fawn had guessed, he found other ways to please her, although she thought he was trying a bit too hard, which made her worry for him, which didn’t help her relax.
She fed him a right fine breakfast, though, and they mounted up and found their way back to the river road by noon. In the late afternoon, they at last left the valley, Dag taking an unmarked track off to the west. They passed through a wide stretch of wooded country, sometimes in single file on twisty trails, sometimes side by side on broader tracks. Fawn was soon lost—well, if she struck east, she’d be sure to find the river again sometime, so she supposed she was only out of her reckoning for going forward, not back—but Dag seemed not to be.
spooky choice of name for this ground ability. He worried over it equally afterwards whether or not he succeeded, and Fawn finally decided that it had been so long since he hadn’t known exactly what he was doing all the time, he’d forgotten what it felt like to be blundering around in the dark, which made her sniff with a certain lack of sympathy.
She gradually became aware that he was dragging his feet on this journey, despite his worries about beating his patrol back to Hickory Lake, and not only for the obvious reason of extending their bedroll time together. Fawn herself was growing intensely curious about what lay ahead, and inclined to move along more briskly, but it wasn’t till the third morning that they did so, and that only because of a threatened change in the weather. The high wispy clouds that both farmers and Lakewalkers called horsefeathers had moved in from the west last night, making fabulous pink streaks in the sunset indigo, and the air today was close and hazy, both signs of a broad storm brewing. When it blew through, it would bring a sparkling day in its wake, but was like to be violent before then. Dag said they might beat it to the lake by late afternoon.
Around noon the woods opened out in some flat meadowlands bordering a creek, with a dual track, and Fawn found herself riding alongside Dag again. “You once said you’d tell me the tale of Utau and Razi if you were either more drunk or more sober. You look pretty sober now.”
He smiled briefly. “Do I? Well, then.”
“Whenever I can get you to talk about your people, it helps me form up some better idea what I’m heading into.”
“I’m not sure Utau’s tale will help much, that way.”
“Maybe not, but at least I won’t say something stupid through not knowing any better.”
He shrugged, though he amended, “Unknowing, maybe. Never stupid.”
“You blush prettily, but I give you the point. Well. Utau was string-bound for a good ten years to Sarri Otter, but they had no children. It happens that way, sometimes, and even Lakewalker groundsense can’t tell why. Both his family and hers were pressuring them to cut their strings and try again with different mates—”
“Wait, what? People can cut their marriage strings? What does that mean, and how does it work?” Fawn wrapped a protective right hand around her left wrist, then put her palm hastily back on her thigh, kicking Grace’s plump sides to encourage her to step along and keep up with Copperhead’s longer legs.
“What leads up to a string-cutting varies pretty wildly with the couple, but lack of children after a good long time trying is considered a reason to part without dishonor to either side. More difficult if only one partner assents to the cutting; then the argument can spread out to both their families’ tents and get very divisive. Or tedious, if you have to listen to them all go on. But if both partners agree to it, the ceremony is much like string-binding, in reverse. The wedding cords are taken off and re-wrapped around both partners’ arms, only with the opposite twist, and knotted, but then the string-blesser takes a knife and cuts the knot apart, and each takes back the pieces of their own.”
Fawn wondered if that knife was carved of bone.
“The grounds drain out back to their sources, and, well, it’s done. People usually burn the dead strings, after.” He glanced aside at her deepening frown. “Don’t farmer marriages ever come apart?”
someone else or anything. It was all undone right quick with no argument, though, so someone must have had something pretty big to apologize for, I’d guess.”
“Sounds like.” His brows rose as he considered this in curiosity, possibly of the more idle sort. “Anyway. Utau and Sarri loved each other despite their sorrow, and didn’t want to part. And they were both good friends with Utau’s cousin Razi. I’m not just sure who persuaded who to what, but one day Razi up and moved all his things into Sarri’s tent with the pair of them. And a few months later Sarri was pregnant. And, to top the matter, not only did Razi get string-bound with Sarri, Razi and Utau got string-bound with each other, so the circle went all the way around and each ended up wearing the strings of both the others. All Otters now. And everyone’s families went around for a while looking like their heads ached, but then there came this beautiful girl baby, and a while after, this bright little boy, that all three just dote on, and everyone else pretty much gave up the worrying. Although not the lewd speculation, naturally.”
Fawn laughed. “Naturally.” Her mind started to drift off in a little lewd speculating of its own, abruptly jerked back to attention when Dag continued in his thoughtful-voice.
“I’ve never made a child, myself. I was always very careful, if not always for the same reasons. There’s not a few who have trouble when they switch over from trying to miss that target to trying to hit it. All their prior care seeming a great waste of a sudden. The sort of useless thing you wonder about late at night.”
Had Dag been doing so, staring up at the stars? Fawn said, “You’d think, with that pattern showing in women’s grounds, it would be easier rather than harder to get a baby just when you wanted.” She was still appalled at how easy it had been for her.
“So you would. Yet so often people miss, and no one knows why. Kauneo and I—” His voice jerked to a halt in that now-familiar way.
“Here’s one I never told anyone ever—”
“You need not,” she said quietly. “Some people are in favor of spitting out hurts, but poking at them too much doesn’t let them heal, either.”
“This one’s ridden in my memory for a long, long time. Maybe it would look a different size if I got it outside my head rather than in it, for once.”
“Then I’m listenin’.” Was he about to uncork another horror-tale?
“Indeed.” He stared ahead between Copperhead’s ears. “We’d been string-bound upwards of a year, and I felt I was getting astride my duties as a company captain, and we decided it was time to start a child. This was in the months just before the wolf war broke. We tried two months running, and missed. Third month, I was away on my duties at the vital time; for the life of me I can’t now remember what seemed so important about them. I can’t even remember what they were. Riding out and checking on something or other. And in the fourth month, the wolf war was starting up, and we were both caught up in the rush.” He drew a long, long breath. “But if I could have made Kauneo pregnant by then, she would have stayed in camp, and not led out her patrol to Wolf Ridge. And whatever else had happened, she and the child would both have lived. If not for that lost month.”
Fawn’s heart felt hot and strange, as if his old wound were being shared through the very ground of his words. Not a good secret to lug around, that one. She tried the obvious patch. “You can’t know that.”
“I know I can’t. I don’t think there’s a second thought I can have about this that I haven’t worn out by now. Maybe Kauneo’s leadership, down at the anchor end of the line, was what held the ridge that extra time after I went down. Maybe…A patroller friend of mine, his first wife died in childbed. I know he harbors regrets just as ferocious for the exact opposite cause. There is no knowing. You just have to grow used to the not knowing, I guess.”
that he’d been with so many women, before or after Kauneo, as that he’d paid really good attention when he had. In the light of her own history, if no child appeared when finally wanted, it would seem clear who was responsible. Did he fear to disappoint?
But his mind had turned down another path now, apparently, for he said, “My immediate family’s not so large as yours. Just my mother, my brother, and his wife at present. All my brother’s children are out of the tent, on patrol or apprenticed to makers. One son’s string-bound, so far.”
Dag’s nephews and nieces were just about the same age range as Fawn and her brothers, from his descriptions. She nodded.
He went on, “I hope to slip into camp quietly. I’m of two minds whether to report to Fairbolt or my family first. It’s likely rumors have trickled back about the Glassforge malice kill ahead of Mari’s return, in which case Fairbolt will want the news in full. And I have to tell him about the knife. But I’d like to introduce you to my brother and mother in my own way, before they hear anything from anyone else.”
“Well, which one would be less offended to be put second?” asked Fawn.
“Hard to say.” He smiled dryly. “Mama can hold a grudge longer, but Fairbolt has a keen memory for lapses as well.”
“I should not like to begin by offending my new mama-in-law.”
“Spark, I’m afraid some people are going to be offended no matter what you and I do. What we’ve done…isn’t done, though it was done in all honor.”
“Well,” she said, trying for optimism, “some people are like that among farmers, too. No pleasing them. You just try, or at least try not to be the first to break.” She considered the problem. “Makes sense to put the worst one first. Then, if you have to, you can get away by saying you need to go off and see the second.”
But he didn’t say which he believed was which.
They rode on through the afternoon without stopping. Fawn thought she could tell when they were nearing the lake by a certain lightness growing in the sky and a certain darkness growing in Dag. At any rate, he got quieter and quieter, though his gaze ahead seemed to sharpen. Finally, his head came up, and he murmured, “The bridge guard and I just bumped grounds. Only another mile.”
They came off the lesser track they’d been following onto a wider road, which ran in a sweeping curve. The land here was very flat; the woods, mixed beech and oak and hickory, gave way to another broad meadow. On the far side, someone lying on the back of what looked to be a grazing cart horse, his legs dangling down over the horse’s barrel, sat up and waved. He kicked the horse into a canter and approached.
The horse wore neither saddle nor bridle, and the young man aboard it was scarcely more dressed. He wore boots, some rather damp-looking linen drawers, a leather belt with a scabbard for a knife, and his sun-darkened skin. As he approached, he yanked the grass stem he’d been chewing from his mouth and threw it aside. “Dag! You’re alive!” He pulled up his horse and stared at the sling, and at Fawn trailing shyly behind. “Aren’t you a sight, now! Nobody said anything about a broken bone! Your right arm, too, absent gods, how have you been managing anything at all?”
Dag returned an uninformative nod of greeting, although he smiled faintly. “I’ve had a little help.”
“Is that your farmer girl?” The guard stared at Fawn as though farmer girls were a novelty out of song, like dancing bears. “Mari Redwing thought you’d been gelded by a mob of furious farmers. Fairbolt’s fuming, your mama thinks you’re dead and blames Mari, and your brother’s complaining he can’t work in the din.”
“Ah,” said Dag in a hollow voice. “Mari’s patrol get back early, did it?” “Yesterday afternoon.”
“You’re the talk of the lake. Again.” The guard squinted and urged his horse closer, which made Copperhead squeal in warning, or at least in ill manners. The man was trying to get a clear look at Fawn’s left wrist, she realized. “All day, people have been giving me urgent messages to pass on the instant I saw you. Fairbolt, Mari, your mama—despite the fact she insists you’re dead, mind—and your brother all want to see you first thing.” He grinned, delivering this impossible demand.
2
T
he bridge the young man guarded was crudely cut timber, long and low, wide enough for two horses to cross abreast. Fawn craned her neck eagerly as she and Dag passed over. The murky water beneath was obscured with lily pads and drifting pond weed; farther along, a few green-headed ducks paddled desultorily in and out of the cattails bordering the banks. “Is this a river or an arm of the lake?”“A bit of both,” said Dag. “One of the tributary creeks comes in just up the way. But the water widens out around both curves. Welcome to Two Bridge Island.”
“Are there two bridges?”
“Really three, but the third goes to Mare Island. The other bridge to the mainland is on the western end, about two miles thataway. This is the narrowest separation.”
“Like a moat?”
“In summer, very like a moat. All of the island chain backing up behind could be defended right here, if it wanted defending. After the hard freeze, this is more like an ice causeway, but the most of us will be gone to winter camp at Bearsford by then. Which, while it does have a ford, is mostly lacking in bears. Camp’s set on some low hills, as much as we have hills in these parts. People who haven’t walked out of this hinterland think they’re hills.”
“Were you born here, or there?”
Flat land and thin woods gave little to view at first as the road wound inward, although around a curve Copperhead snorted and pretended to shy as a flock of a dozen or so wild turkeys crossed in front of them. The turkeys returned apparent disdain and wandered away into the undergrowth. Around the next curve Dag twitched his horse aside into the verge, and Fawn paused with him, as a caravan passed. A gray-headed man rode ahead; following him, on no lead, were a dozen horses loaded with heavy basket panniers piled high with dark, round, lumpy objects covered in turn with crude rope nets to keep the loads from tumbling out. A boy brought up the rear.
Fawn stared. “I don’t suppose that’s a load of severed heads going somewhere, but it sure looks like it at a distance. No wonder folks think you’re cannibals.”
Dag laughed, turning to look after the retreating string. “You know, you’re right! That, my love, is a load of plunkins, on their way to winter store. This is their season. In late summer, it is every Lakewalker’s duty to eat up his or her share of fresh plunkins. You are going to learn all about plunkins.”
From his tone Fawn wasn’t sure if that was a threat or a promise, but she liked the wry grin that went along-with. “I hope to learn all about everything.”
He gave her a warmly encouraging nod and led off once more. Fawn wondered when she was going to at last see tents, and especially Dag’s tent.
A shimmering light through the screen of trees, mostly hickory, marked the shoreline to the right. Fawn stood up in her stirrups, trying for a glimpse of the water. She said in surprise, “Cabins!”
“Tents,” Dag corrected.
porches. She glimpsed a few shadowy people moving within, and, crossing the yard, a Lakewalker woman wearing a skirt and shepherding a toddler. So did only patrolling women wear trousers?
“If it’s missing one full side, it’s still a tent, not a permanent structure, and therefore does not have to be burned down every ten years.” Dag sounded as if he was reciting.
Fawn’s nose wrinkled in bafflement. “What?”
“You could call it a religious belief, although usually it’s more of a religious argument. In theory, Lakewalkers are not supposed to build permanent structures. Towns are targets. So are farms, for that matter. So is anything so big and heavy or that you’ve invested so much in you can’t drop it and run if you have to. Farmers would defend to the death. Lakewalkers would retreat and regroup. If we all lived in theory instead of on Two Bridge Island, that is. The only buildings that seem to get burned in the Ten-year Rededication these days are ones the termites have got to. Certain stodgy parties predict dire retribution for our lapses. In my experience, retribution turns up all on its own regardless, so I don’t worry about it much.”
Fawn shook her head. I may have more to learn than I thought.
They passed a couple more such clusters of near buildings. Each seemed to have a dock leading out into the water, or perhaps that was a raft tied to the shore; one had a strange boat tied to it in turn, long and narrow. Smoke rose from chimneys, and Fawn could see homely washing strung on lines to dry. Kitchen gardens occupied sunny patches, and small groves of fruit trees bordered the clearings, with a few beehives set amongst them. “How many Lakewalkers are there on this island?”
many exchange patrollers as we ever get in return.” A hint of pride tinged his voice, even though his last remarks ought to have sounded more complaint than brag. He nodded ahead toward something Fawn did not yet see, and at a jingle of harness and thud of many hooves gestured her into the weeds to make way, turning Copperhead alongside.
It was a patrol, trotting in double file, very much as Fawn had first seen Mari and Dag’s troop ride into the well-house farm what was beginning to seem a lifetime ago. This bunch looked fresh and rested and unusually tidy, however, so she guessed they were outward bound, on their way to whatever patch of hinterland they were assigned to search for their nightmare prey. Most of them seemed to recognize Dag and cried surprised greetings; with his reins wrapped around his hook and his other arm in a sling, he could not return their waves, but he did nod and smile. They didn’t pause, but not a few of them turned in their saddles to stare back at the pair.
“Barie’s lot,” said Dag, looking after them. “Twenty-two.”
He’d counted them? “Is that good or bad, twenty-two?”
“Not too bad, for this time of year. It’s a busy season.” He chirped to Copperhead, and they took to the road once more.
Fawn wondered anew what the shape of her life was going to be, tucked in around Dag’s. On a farm, a couple might work together or apart, long hours and hard, but they would still meet for meals three times a day and sleep together every night. Dag would not, presumably, take her patrolling. Therefore, she must stay here, in long, scary separations punctuated by brief reunions, at least till Dag grew too old to patrol. Or too injured, or didn’t come back one day, but her mind shied from thinking too hard about that one. If she was to be left here with these people and no Dag, she’d best try to fit in. Hardworking hands were needed everywhere all the time; surely hers could win her a place.
Dag straightened his shoulders, grimaced, and led left instead. Half a mile on, the woods thinned again, and the distinctive silvery light reflecting from the water glimmered between the shaggy boles. The road ended at another that ran along the northern shore, unless it was just rejoining the same one circling the perimeter of the island. Dag led left again.
A brief ride brought them to a broad cleared section with several long log buildings, many of which had walls all the way around, with wooden porches and lots of rails for tying horses. No kitchen gardens or washing, although a few fruit trees were dotted here and there, broad apple and tall, graceful pear. On the woodland side of the road was an actual barn, if built rather low, the first Fawn had seen here, and a couple of split-rail paddocks for horses, though only a few horses idled in them at the moment. A trio of small, lean, black pigs rooted among the trees for fallen fruit or nuts. On the lakeside a larger dock jutted out into the water.
Dag edged Copperhead up to one of the hitching rails outside a log building, dropped his reins, and stretched his back. He cast Fawn an afterthought of a smile. “Well, here we are.”
Fawn thought this a bit too close-mouthed, even for Dag in a mood. “This isn’t your house, is it?”
“Ah. No. Patroller headquarters.”
“So we’re seeing Fairbolt Crow first?”
“If he’s in. If I’m lucky, he will have gone off somewhere.” Dag dismounted, and Fawn followed, tying both horses to the rail. She trailed him up onto the porch and through a plank door.
“Woo-ee! Look what just dragged in!”
Dag gave her a wry nod. “How de’, Massape. Is, um…Fairbolt here?”
“Oh, aye.”
“Is he busy?” Dag asked, in a most unpressing tone.
“He’s in there talking with Mari. About you, I expect, judging from the yelps. Fairbolt’s been telling her not to panic. She says she prefers to start panicking as soon as you’re out of her sight, just to get beforehand on things. Looks like they’re both in the right. What in the world have you done to yourself this time?” She nodded at his sling, then sat up, her eyes narrowing as they fell on the braid circling his left arm. She said again, in an entirely altered tone, “Dag, what in the wide green world have you done?”
Fawn, awash in this conversation, gave Dag a poke and a look of desperate inquiry.
“Ah,” he said. “Fawn, meet Massape Crow, who is captain to Third Company—Barie’s patrol that we passed going out is in her charge, among others. She’s also Fairbolt’s wife. Massape, this is Missus Fawn Bluefield. My wife.” His chin did not so much rise in challenge as set in stubbornness.
Fawn smiled brightly, clutched her hands together making sure her left wrist showed, and gave a polite dip of her knees. “How de’, ma’am.”
Massape just stared, her lower lip drawn in over her teeth. “You…” She held up a finger for a long, uncertain moment, drawling out the word, then swung and pointed past the room’s fireplace, central to the inner wall, to a door beyond. “See Fairbolt.”
Dag returned her a dry nod and shepherded Fawn to the door, opening it for her. From the room beyond, Fawn heard Mari’s voice saying, “If he’s stuck to his route, he should be somewhere along the line here.”
and the edges run off the blighted map.”
“If you’ve no one else to spare, I’ll go.”
“You just got back. Cattagus would have words with me till he ran out of breath and turned blue, and then you’d be mad. Look, we’ll put out the call to every patroller who leaves camp to keep groundsense and both eyes peeled…”
Both patrollers, Fawn realized, must have their groundsenses locked down tight in the heat of their argument not to be flying to the door by now. No— she glanced at Dag’s stony face—all three. She grabbed Dag by the belt and pushed him through ahead of her, peeking cautiously around him.
This room was a mirror to the first, at least as far as the shelving packed to the ceiling went. A plank table in the middle, its several chairs kicked back to the wall, seemed to be spread with maps. A thickset man was standing with his arms crossed, a frown on his furrowed face. Iron-colored hair was drawn back from his retreating hairline into a single plait down his back; he wore patroller-style trousers and shirt but no leather vest. Only one knife hung from his belt, but Fawn noticed a long, unstrung bow propped against the cold fireplace, together with a quiver of arrows.
Mari, similarly clad, had her back to the door and was leaning over the table pointing at something. The man glanced up, and his gray brows climbed toward what was left of his hairline. His leathery lips twisted in a half grin. “Got that coin, Mari?”
She looked up at him, exasperation in the set of her neck. “What coin?”
“The one you said we’d flip to see who got to skin him first.”
Mari, taking in his expression, wheeled. “Dag! You…! Finally! Where have you been?” Her eyes, raking him up and down, caught as usual first on the sling. “Ye gods.”
reasonable causes. “Sorry for the worry.”
“I left you in Glassforge pretty near four weeks ago!” said Mari. “You were supposed to go straight home! Shouldn’t have taken you more than a week at most!”
“No,” Dag said in a tone of judicious correction, “I told you we’d be stopping off at the Bluefield farm on the way, to put them at ease about Fawn, here. I admit that took longer than I’d planned. Though once the arm was busted there seemed no rush, as I figured I wouldn’t be able to patrol again for nigh on six weeks anyway.”
Fairbolt scowled at this dodgy argument. “Mari said that if your luck was good, you’d come to your senses and dump the farmer girl back on her family, but if it ran to your usual form, they’d beat you to death and hide the body. Did her kin bust your bone?”
“If I’d been her kin, I’d have broken more of them,” Mari muttered. “You still got all your parts, boy?”
Dag’s smile thinned. “I had a run-in with a sneak thief in Lumpton Market, actually. Got our gear back, for the price of the arm. My visit to West Blue went very pleasantly.”
Fawn decided not to offer any adjustment to this bald-faced assertion. She didn’t quite like the way the patrollers—all three of them—kept looking right at her and talking right over her, but they were on Dag’s land here; she waited for guidance, or at least a hint. Though she thought he could stand to speed up, in that regard. Conscious of the officers’ eyes upon her—Fairbolt was leaning sideways slightly to get a view around Dag—she crept out from behind her husband. She gave Mari a friendly little wave, and the camp captain a respectful knee-dip. “Hello again, Mari. How de’ do, sir?”
Dag drew breath and repeated his blunt introduction: “Fairbolt, meet Missus Fawn Bluefield. My wife.”
felt, more than just their eyes. Both officers had their sleeves rolled up in the heat of the day, and both had similar cords winding around their left wrists, worn thin and frayed and faded. Her own cord and Dag’s looked bright and bold and thick by comparison, the gold beads anchoring the ends seeming very solid.
Fairbolt glanced aside at Mari, his eyes narrowing still further. “Did you suspect this?”
“This? No! This isn’t—how could—but I told you he’d likely done some fool thing no one could anticipate.”
“You did,” Fairbolt conceded. “And I didn’t. I thought he was just…” He focused his gaze on Dag, and Fawn shrank even though she was not at its center. “I won’t say that’s impossible because it’s plain you found a way. I will ask, what Lakewalker maker helped you to this?”
“None, sir,” said Dag steadily. “None but me, Fawn’s aunt Nattie, who is a spinner and natural maker, and Fawn. Together.”
Though not so tall as Dag, Fairbolt was still a formidably big man. He frowned down at Fawn; she had to force her spine straight. “Lakewalkers do not recognize marriages to farmers. Did Dag tell you that?”
She held out her wrist. “That’s why this, I understood.” She gripped the cord tight, for courage. If they couldn’t be bothered to be polite to her, she needn’t return any better. “Now, I guess you could look at this with your fancy groundsense and say we weren’t married if you wanted. But you’d be lying. Wouldn’t you.”
Fairbolt rocked back. Dag didn’t flinch. If anything, he looked satisfied, if a bit fey. Mari rubbed her forehead.
Dag said quietly, “Did Mari tell you about my other knife?”
the way. What number was that? And don’t tell me you don’t keep count.”
Dag gave a little conceding nod. “It would have been twenty-seven, if it had been my kill. It was Fawn’s.”
“It was both ours,” Fawn put in. “Dag had the knife, I had the chance to use it. Either of us would have been lost without the other.”
“Huh.” Fairbolt walked slowly around Fawn, as if looking, really looking, at her for the first time. “Excuse me,” he said, and reached out to tilt her head and study the deep red scars on her neck. He stepped back and sighed. “Let’s see this other knife, then.”
Fawn fished in her shirt. After the scare at Lumpton Market she had fashioned a new sheath for the blade, single and of softer leather, with a cord for her neck to carry it the way Lakewalkers did. It was undecorated, but she’d sewn it with care. Hesitantly, she pulled the cord over her curls, glanced at Dag, who gave her a nod of reassurance, and handed it over to the camp captain.
Fairbolt took it and sat down in one of the chairs near a window, drawing the bone blade out. He examined it much the way Dag and Mari had, even to touching it to his lips. He sat frowning a moment, cradling it in his thick hands. “Who made this for you, Dag? Not Dar?”
“No. A maker up in Luthlia, a few months after Wolf Ridge.”
“Kauneo’s bone, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Did you ever have reason before to think the making might be defective?”
“No. I don’t think it was.”
“But if the making was sound, no one but you should have been able to prime it.”
have been able to prime it at all. But there it sits.”
“That it does. So tell me exactly what happened in that cave, again…?”
First Dag, and then Fawn, had to repeat the tale for Fairbolt, each in their own words. They touched but lightly on how Dag had come upon Fawn, kidnapped off the road by bandits in the thrall of the malice. How he’d tracked her to the malice’s cave. And come—Dag bit his lip—just too late to stop the monster from ripping the ground of her two-months-child from her womb. Fawn did not volunteer, nor did Fairbolt ask, how she came to be alone, pregnant—and unwed—on the road in the first place; perhaps Mari, who’d had the tale from Fawn back in Glassforge, had given him the gist.
Fairbolt’s attention and questions grew keener when they described the mix-up with Dag’s malice-killing sharing knives. How Dag, going down under the malice’s guard of mud-men, had tossed the knife pouch to Fawn, how she’d stuck the monster first with the wrong, unprimed knife, then with the right one, shattering it in its use. How the terrifying creature had dissolved, leaving the first knife so strangely charged with the mortality of Fawn’s unborn daughter.
By the time they were half-through, Mari had pulled up a chair, and Dag leaned against the table. Fawn found she preferred to stand, though she had to lock her knees against an unwelcome trembling. Fairbolt did not, to Fawn’s relief, inquire into the messy aftermath of that fight; his interest seemed to end with the mortal knives.
“You are planning to show this to Dar,” Fairbolt said when they’d finished, nodding to the knife still in his lap; from his tone Fawn wasn’t sure if this was query or command.
“Yes.”
“Let me know what he says.” He hesitated. “Assuming the other matter doesn’t affect his judgment?” He jerked his head toward Dag’s left arm.
speak straight on his craft, regardless. If I have doubts after, I can always seek another opinion. There are half a dozen knife makers around this lake.”
“Of lesser skill,” said Fairbolt, watching him closely.
“That’s why I’m going to Dar first. Or at all.”
Fairbolt started to hand the knife back to Dag but, at Dag’s gesture, returned it to Fawn. She put the cord back over her head and hid the sheath away again between her breasts.
Fairbolt, almost eye to eye with her, watched this coolly. “That knife doesn’t make you some sort of honorary Lakewalker, you know, girl.”
Dag frowned. But before he could say anything, Fawn, despite the heat flushing through her, replied calmly, “I know that, sir.” She leaned in toward him, and deepened her voice. “I’m a farmer girl and proud of it, and if that’s good enough for Dag, the rest of you can go jump in your lake. Just so you
know this thing I have slung around my neck wasn’t an honorary death.” She nodded curtly and stood straight.
A little to her surprise, he did not grow offended, merely thoughtful, if that was what rubbing his lips that way signified. He stood up with a grunt that reminded her of a tired Dag, and strode across the room to the far side of the fireplace.
Covering the whole surface between the chimney stone and the outer wall and nearly floor to ceiling was a panel made of some very soft wood. It was painted with a large grid pattern, each marked with a place name. Fawn realized, looking at the names she recognized, that it was a sort of map, if lines on a map could be pulled about and squared off, of parts of the hinterland—all the parts, she suspected. To the left-hand side was a separate column of squares, labeled Two Bridge Island, Heron Island, Beaver Sigh, Bearsford, and Sick List. And, above them all, a smaller circle in red paint labeled Missing.
looking at patrols—some squares were full of little holes as though they might have been lately emptied. Each peg had a name inked onto the side in tiny, meticulous writing, and a number on its end. Some of the pegs had wooden buttons, like coins with holes bored in the middle, hung on them by twisted wires, one or two or sometimes more threaded in a stack. The buttons, too, were numbered.
“Oh!” she said in surprise. “These are all your patrollers!” There must have been five or six hundred pegs in all. She leaned closer to search for names she recognized.
Fairbolt raised his brows. “That’s right. A patrol leader can keep a patrol in mind, but once you get to be a company or camp captain, well, one head can’t hold them all. Or at least, mine can’t.”
“That’s clever! You can see everything all at once, pretty nearly.” She realized she needed to look more closely at Two Bridge Island for names. “Ah, there’s Mari. And Razi and Utau, they’re home with Sarri, oh good. Where’s Dirla?”
“Beaver Sigh,” said Dag, watching her pore over the display. “That’s another island.”
“Mm? Oh, yes, there she is, too. I hope she’s happy. Does she have a regular sweetheart? Or sweethearts? What are the little buttons for?”
Mari answered. “For the patrollers who are carrying sharing knives. Not everyone has one, but every patrol that goes out needs to have two or more.”
“Oh. Yes, that makes sense. Because it wouldn’t do a bit of good to find a malice and have no knife on hand. And you might find another malice, after. Or have an accident.” Dag had spoken with a shudder of the ignominy of accidentally breaking a sharing knife, and now she understood. She hesitated, thinking of her own spectacular, if peculiar, sharing knife accident. “Why are they numbered?”
know where to send the pieces if they chance to be recovered.”
Fawn frowned. “Is that why the patrollers are numbered, too?”
“Very like. There’s another set of books with all the names and next of kin, and other details someone might want to know about any particular patroller in an emergency. Or when the emergency is over.”
“Mm,” said Fawn, her frown deepening as she pictured this. She set her hands on her hips and peered at the board, imagining all those lives—and deaths—moving over the landscape. “Do you connect the pegs to people’s grounds, like marriage cords? Could you?”
“No,” said Dag.
“Does she always go on like this?” asked Fairbolt. She glanced up to find him staring at her rather as she’d been staring at the patroller board.
“More or less, yes,” said Dag.
“I’m sorry!” Fawn clapped her hand to her mouth in apology. “Did I ask too many questions?”
Fairbolt gave her a funny look. “No.” He reached up and took a peg out of the Missing circle, one of two jutting there. He held it out at arm’s length, squinting briefly at the fine print on the side, and grunted satisfaction. “I suppose this comes off, now.” With surprising delicacy, his thick fingers unwound its wire and teased off one numbered button. The second he frowned at, but twisted back into place. “I never met the Luthlia folks; never got up that way. You be taking care of the honors on this one, Dag?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Thanks.” He held the peg in his palm as if weighing it.
Dag reached up and touched the remaining peg in the red circle. “Still no word of Thel.” It didn’t sound like a question.
“It’s been near two years, Fairbolt,” Mari observed dispassionately. “You could likely take it down.”
“It’s not like the board’s out of room up there, now is it?” Fairbolt sniffed, stared unreadably at Dag, gave the peg in his hand a toss, and bent down and thrust it decisively into the square marked Sick List.
He straightened up and turned back to Dag. “Stop in at the medicine tent. Let me know what they say about the arm. Come see me after you have that talk with Dar.” He made a vague gesture of dismissal, but then added, “Where are you going next?”
“Dar.” Dag added more reluctantly, “Mother.”
Mari snorted. “What are you going to say to Cumbia about that?” She nodded at his arm cord.
Dag shrugged. “What’s to say? I’m not ashamed, I’m not sorry, and I’m not backing down.”
“She’ll spit.”
“Likely.” He smiled grimly. “Want to come watch?”
Mari rolled her eyes. “I think I want to go back out on patrol. Fairbolt, you need volunteers?”
“Always, but not you today. Go along home to Cattagus. Your stray has turned up; you’ve no more excuse to loiter here harassing me.”
“Eh,” she said, whether in agreement or disagreement Fawn could not tell. She cast a vague sort of salute at Fairbolt and Dag, murmured, “Good luck, child,” at Fawn, in a rather-too-ironical voice, and took herself out.
Dag made to follow, but stopped with a look of inquiry when Fairbolt said, “Dag.”
“Eighteen years ago,” said Fairbolt, “you persuaded me to take a chance on you. I never had cause to regret it.”
Till now? Fawn wondered if he meant to imply.
“I don’t care to defend this in the camp council. See that it doesn’t boil up that high, eh?”
“I’ll try not,” said Dag.
Fairbolt returned a provisional sort of nod, and Fawn followed Dag out.
Missus Captain Crow was gone from the outer room. Outside, the sky had turned a flat gray, the water of the lake a pewter color, and the humidity had become oppressive. As they made their way down the porch steps to where the horses were tied, Dag sighed. “Well. That could have gone worse.”
Fawn recognized her own words tossed back to her, and remembered Dag’s. “Really?”
His lips twitched; it wasn’t much of a smile, but at least it was a real one, and not one of those grimaces with the emphasis on the grim he’d mostly had inside. “Really. Fairbolt could have pulled my peg and chucked it in the fire. Then all my problems would have been not his problems anymore.”
“What, he could have made you not a patroller?”
“That’s right.”
Fawn gasped. “Oh, no! And I said all those mouthy things to him! You should have warned me! But he made me mad, talking over the top of my head.” She added after a moment’s reflection, “You all three did.”
“Mm,” said Dag. He pulled her into his left arm and rested his chin on her curls for a moment. “I imagine so. Things were moving pretty fast there for a while.”
a good deal back there she hadn’t caught.
“As for Fairbolt, you won’t offend him by standing up to him, even if you’re wrong, but especially if you’re right. His back’s broad enough to bear correction. He doesn’t much care for folks who go belly-up to him to his face then whine about it behind his back, though.”
“Well…stands to reason, that.”
“Indeed. You didn’t make a bad impression on him, Spark. In fact, judging from the results, you made a pretty good impression.”
“Well, that’s a relief.” She paused in puzzlement. “What results?”
“He put my peg in the sick box. Still a patroller. The camp council deals with any arguments the families can’t solve, or arguments that come up between clan heads. But any active patroller, the council has to go through the camp captain to deal with. It’s like he’s clan head to all of us. I won’t say Fairbolt will or even can protect me from any consequences of this”—he shrugged his left arm to indicate his marriage cord—“but leastways he’s keeping that possibility open for now.”
Fawn turned to untie the horses, considering this. The tailpiece seemed to be that it was Dag’s job—and hers?—to keep the consequences from getting too out of hand. As she scrambled up on Grace, she saw under some pear trees at a little distance Mari sitting on a trestle table swinging her legs, and Massape Crow on the bench beside her. Mari seemed to be talking heatedly, by the way she was waving her arms, and Massape had her head cocked in apparent fascination. Fawn didn’t think she needed groundsense to guess the subject under discussion, even without the curious glances the pair cast their way.
Dag had wrapped Copperhead’s reins around his hook. Now he led the horse beside the porch and used the steps for a mounting block, settling into the saddle with a tired grunt. He jerked his chin by way of a come-along
3
F
awn turned in her saddle to look as they passed the woodland road they’d come in on, and turned again as the shore road bent out toward a wooden bridge spanning a channel about sixty feet across. The next island spread west, bounding the arm of the lake across from the patroller headquarters. Past the bridge, its farther shoreline curved north and the lake beyond opened out for a square mile. In the distance she could see a few narrow boats being paddled, and another with a small triangular sail. The island reached by the bridge had only a scattering of trees; between them horses and goats and a few sheep grazed, and beneath them more black pigs dozed.“Mare Island?” Fawn guessed.
“Yep. It and Foal Island, which you can’t see beyond the far end over there”—Dag waved vaguely northwest—“are our main pastures. No need to build fences, you see.”
“I do. Clever. Is there a Stallion Island?”
Dag smiled. “More or less. Most of the studs are kept over on Walnut Island”—he pointed to a low green bump across the open lake patch—“which works fine until one of the fellows gets excited and ambitious and tries to swim across in the night. Then there’s some sorting out to do.”
The shore road swung back into the trees, passing behind the clusters of log buildings along the lake bank. After a scant quarter mile, Dag pulled up Copperhead and frowned at a clearing enclosing just two buildings. The lake glimmered dully beyond in the hot afternoon’s flat light. “Tent Redwing,” Dag said.
“Not quite. Everyone seems to be out. But leastways we can drop off our saddles and bags and take the horses back to pasture.”
They rode into the clearing. The two buildings were set facing each other at an angle opening toward the lake, both with long sides gaping under deerhide awnings. Other deerhide rolls along the eaves looked as though they could be dropped down to provide more wall at need. Houses and porches seemed to be floored with planks, not dirt, at least. Fawn tried to think
simple, not squalid. A stone-lined fire pit lay in the clearing between the two structures—Fawn still could not make herself think of them as tents—in addition to the central fireplaces that could apparently heat both the outer and the enclosed inner chambers. Seats of stumps or sawn-off logs were dotted about; in summer, no doubt almost all work was done outdoors.
She hopped down and helped unsaddle, dealing with the straps and buckles; Dag with his hook hauled the gear from the horses’ backs and dumped it on the plank porch of the house on the right. He scratched the back of his head gently.
“Not sure where Mama’s got off to. Dar’s likely at the bone shack. And if Omba’s not out on Mare Island, it’ll be a first. Dig down in the bottom of my saddlebags, Spark, and find those strings of horseshoes.”
Fawn did so, discovering two bunches of new horseshoes tied together, a dozen each. “My word, no wonder your bags were so heavy! How long have you been carting these around in there?”
“Since we left Glassforge. Present for Omba. Hickory Lake’s a rich camp in some ways, but we have few metals in these parts, except for a little copper-working near Bearsford. All our iron has to be traded for from other camps, mostly around Tripoint. Though we’ve been getting more from farmer sources in the hills beyond Glassforge, lately.” He grinned briefly. “When a certain young exchange patroller from Tripoint walking the hinterlands arrived at Massape Crow and said, That’s far enough, it’s told his bride-gift string of horses came in from back home staggering under loads of iron. It made the Crows rich and Fairbolt famous, back in the day.”
her up the horseshoe bundles, which she twisted about each other and laid over her lap. He climbed up on Copperhead in turn, and they went back out to the road and returned to the bridge.
At the far end of the span he dismounted again to unhook a rope loop from the board gate, open it for Fawn, and shut it again behind them. He did not bother remounting, but led them instead toward a long shed that lay a hundred paces or so away. Fawn slid off Grace, managing not to drop the horseshoes, and Dag hooked off both bridles, flopping them over his shoulder. Copperhead scooted away at once, and after a moment’s doubt, Grace followed, soon putting her head down to crop grass.
Of all of his relatives, Dag had talked most freely about his brother’s wife, the Waterstrider sister who’d changed her name for her mother-in-law’s sake. In order of increasing reticence came his grandfather, remembered with nostalgia from scenes of Dag’s youth; Dar, of whom Dag spoke with cool respect; his father, tinged with distance and regret; and, in a pool of silence at the center, his mother. Every conversation Fawn had tried to lead toward her, Dag had led away. About Omba—horse trainer, mare midwife, maker of harness, and, it appeared, farrier—there had been no such problem.
As they rounded the corner of the shed and stepped under its wooden overhang, Fawn had no trouble recognizing Omba, for she came striding out of a door crying, “Dag! Finally!” She was not so thin as Mari, and quite a bit shorter, though still as tall as any man in Fawn’s family; Fawn would have guessed her age at fifty or so, which meant she was likely fifteen years older than that. She was dressed much like a patroller woman, and Fawn finally decided that the trousers were just Lakewalker riding garb, period. Her skin, though tanned and weathered, was paler than Dag’s, and her eyes a pretty silvery blue. Her dark hair, shot with a few white streaks, ran down her back in a single swift plait, without ornament. She caught sight of the sling, planted her hands on her hips, and said, “Absent gods, brother, what have you done to your right arm!” And then, after a momentary pause, “Absent gods, Dag, what have you done to your left arm?”
Omba’s face lit, and she pounced on the prize. “Do I need those!” She came to a dead halt again at the sight of the cord on Fawn’s wrist, and made a choked noise down in her throat. Her gaze rose to Fawn’s face, her eyes widening in something between disbelief and dismay. “You’re a farmer! You’re that farmer!”
For an instant, Fawn wondered if there was some Lakewalker significance to Dag’s tricking Omba into accepting this gift from Fawn’s hands, but she had no time or way to ask. She dipped her knees, and said breathlessly, “Hello, Omba. I’m Fawn. Dag’s wife.” She wasn’t about to make some broader claim such as, I’m your new sister; that would be for Omba to decide.
Omba wheeled toward Dag, her eyebrows climbing. “And what does that make you, Dag Redwing Hickory? Besides head down in the slit trench.”
“Fawn’s husband. Dag Bluefield…To-Be-Determined, at this point.”
Or would the effect instead be to make Dag not Omba’s brother anymore? Lakewalker tent customs continued to confuse Fawn.
“You seen Fairbolt yet?” asked Omba.
“Just came from there. Saw Mari there, too.”
“You told him about this?” She jerked her head toward Fawn.
“Certainly.”
“What did he do to you?”
“Put me on sick list.” Dag wriggled his sling. “That was the To-Be-Determined part, or so I took it.”
Omba blew out her breath in unflattering wonder. But not, Fawn thought, in hostility; she hung on tight to that realization. It did not seem as though Dag had taken her advice to start with the hardest ones first. By later today,
not hostile might yet look pretty good.
“Oh, there was a scene. She came in asking if we’d heard from you, which was a jolt to start, since you were supposed to be with her. Then she said she’d sent you home from Glassforge weeks ago, and everyone was worried you’d been injured, but she said not. Is that right?” She stared at the sling.
“Was at the time. I collected this on the way. Go on.”
“Then she had this wild tale about some cutie farmer girl being mixed up in your latest malice kill”—her eyes went curiously to Fawn—“which I barely believed, but now, hm. And that you’d jumped the cliff with her, which your mama hotly denied the possibility of, while simultaneously yelling at Mari for letting it happen. I kept my mouth shut during that part. Though I did wish you well of it.”
“Thank you,” said Dag blandly.
“Ha. Though I never imagined…anyway. Mari said that you’d gone off with the farmer girl, supposed to deliver her home or something. She was afraid you’d met some mishap at the hands of her kin—she said she was picturing gelding. That must have been some cliff. When Mari and your mama got down to arguing over lapses from twenty-five years back, I slipped out. But Mari took Dar down to the dock after, to talk private. He wouldn’t say what she’d added, except that it was about bone craft, which even your mama knows by now is the sign she’ll get no more from him.”
It seemed Mari was still keeping the tale of the accident to the second sharing knife close. Nor had the term pregnant turned up in relation to Fawn, at least in front of Dag’s mama. Fawn felt suddenly more charitable to Mari.
“Oh, Dag,” sighed Omba. “This is going to top anything you’ve done ever.”
“Look on the bright side. Nothing you can do ever after will top this. The effect might even be retroactive.”
